However, there are a range of tools you can use to not only ensure that your content is good, but streamlines your process too.

In this post, we’re going to walk you through a range of content marketing tools you can use at each stage of the content production process to ensure your entire content machine is as good as it can be.

Generating ideas

Before you even begin to write, you need to generate some ideas. In most cases, because you’re writing about your business and industry, you’ll have a range of ideas already.

But sometimes, you might want to look for ideas that you perhaps haven’t yet thought of. These ideas are also often what your customers want to read.

The following tools are there to help you come up with the best content ideas for your organisation.

Answer the public

Answer the public is a great tool that helps you generate loads of content ideas.

To use the tool, pick an overarching topic. It’s important to note here that you want to be less specific with your topic as this will give you a wider pool of results.

For example, searching for “SEO” (as you can see in the image above), gives you more results than if you searched for something super specific like “How to increase on-page SEO in one day”.

The reason for this is the tool pulls all the questions people might ask Google (or other search engines) and presents them to you.

This way you never run out of ideas and perhaps you’ll notice ideas or topics you haven’t yet thought about.

Because this tool uses Google, it works well for any industry or topic and what’s more, it’s free.

Google

Although there are plenty of paid tools that help you come up with content ideas – one often underused tool is Google itself.

When you conduct a search on Google, there are two sections that are particularly interesting for anyone who wants more ideas.

The first is the “searches related to” section. This section shows you other searches people have conducted, based on the one you used.

In this example, we can see that we’ve searched for “blog post” but others have searched for “blog post examples”, “best blog post”. It’s clear already that there are plenty of other topic opportunities you can use, alongside your main one.

Further to that is the “people also ask” section.

This section shows you other questions people have asked Google. One thing to remember is when people go to a search engine, they’re (for the most part) looking for answers.

If you can create content that directly answers their questions, you’ll find your own search rankings increase.

Removing distractions

When it comes to sitting down and actually writing, you’ll know as well as most that anything and everything else seems to get in the way.

Have to write a 2000 word blog post? Suddenly you remember you need to clean your kitchen.

Need to put together a content brief?

Suddenly you want to reply to all those emails.

It happens to the best of us. The best way to deal with this, though, is to remove distractions.

There are a number of great tools you can use to help you focus on the task in hand and get your content written in record time.

Hemingway

As you can see the image above, Hemingway lets you know if you’ve used passive voice within your sentences as well as highlighting when sentences are too hard to read.

There is also a handy grade score you can use to check that your work will be received well by your target audience.

Hemingway is free, but if you feel as though it’s a tool you’ll use regularly, they have a paid desktop version you can download.

This is particularly useful for when you’re working offline.

Takeaways

Creating great content doesn’t have to be difficult. If you’re strapped for time, struggling with distractions or need better ways to put together images, the tools listed above can help you do just that.